The clerk turned the old leather ledger around so that I could read it. It was a book of surveyor payments from the county, dated 1957, and in neat brown ink, about halfway down a page, was a line that read, “Paid, O. Kvamme, for resetting of east pin, Lot Nine, $12.” I read it twice. Then I looked at the clerk, who was gently shaking her head. “Mrs. Voss,” she said, “the new owner of the lot next door is Tyler Kvamme. I checked the tax roll while you were reading. That man is the great grandson of the man who paid to have your pin moved.”
I will tell you honestly that I felt no triumph. I felt tired, the way you do when you have been carrying a heavy pot for a long distance and finally set it down. The clerk made me a photocopy of the ledger page and of the letter from the county surveyor, Elmer Haugen. Reading it again in the car, I understood what my father had meant to do with it. Elmer had written, in 1958, “I have reset the east pin to its true position, Mr. Voss, and recorded both locations. You may rest easy.” The pin that Tyler had measured from was the old, false one.
I drove home and made a pot of coffee. At four that afternoon, Tyler came across the yard with his survey in his hand, as he had been doing every day that week, and I opened the screen door before he could knock. “Come in,” I said. “I have something to show you.” He hesitated. Then he took off his sneakers on the porch, which no one had asked him to do, and followed me to the kitchen table. I laid the ledger page in front of him, then the letter, and then the old plat of my father, and I poured him a cup.
Every good fence begins with an honest line, and every honest line begins with someone willing to admit where the old one was wrong.
He read the ledger first. I watched the color go out of his face. He read the line with his own family name, and he read it again, and then he put his hand over his mouth. “My great grandfather,” he said. “Orrin. My grandmother used to say he could talk a dog off a meat truck.” He picked up the letter from Elmer Haugen and read it slowly, moving his lips like a schoolboy. When he finished, he sat very still for a minute. Then, very quietly, he said, “Mrs. Voss, I am so sorry. I had no idea.”
I told him I believed him. I also told him that in sixty six years of living next to the Kvamme family I had never heard a harsh word between our houses, and that I did not intend to start now. Tyler laughed in a way that was almost a sob. He said that his mother had warned him to be careful about the land, and that he thought she meant the taxes. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I put stakes through your tomatoes,” he said. “I offered you five hundred dollars. I wanted to crawl under the porch.”
He called a licensed surveyor the following week and paid for a new survey out of his own pocket. The surveyor, an older man with a gray ponytail, found the true pin on the second try, a rusty iron rod sunk eight inches below the topsoil, exactly where Elmer Haugen had put it in 1958. The line ran fourteen feet east of the false one, straight through the middle of the garden of my mother. He drove a new steel stake into the ground with a mallet and sprayed it bright orange, and for the first time in months, I stopped worrying.
The fence went up the following Monday, as Tyler had said it would, but on the proper line. He built it himself, in the heat, with a rented auger and a borrowed truck. He even installed a small gate in the middle of it, wide enough for a wheelbarrow, and he painted it the same shade of white as the toolshed of my father. When he finished, he stood and looked at it, his hands on his hips. “I figured you might want to come over and pick some of my raspberries,” he said. “And I might want to come over for tomatoes.”
I have been growing tomatoes in that exact spot for sixty six years, and I will tell you a secret about them. They never taste as good as when a neighbor asks for one. Tyler came over every Saturday that summer with a salt shaker in his pocket, and he ate his tomatoes right off the vine, with the juice running down his wrist. He asked a hundred questions about my mother, about my father, about the way the town looked in 1958. I answered every one. He wrote some of it down in a little notebook.
In September the county historical society heard about the pin, and a young woman with a camera came to interview us both. They set up chairs on the lawn on either side of the fence. Tyler told the story first, and he did not spare himself. He called it “the worst thing my family ever did and the best thing that ever happened to me,” and then he turned a little red. The woman asked me what I wanted people to remember. I said, “That a line on a map is only as honest as the man who drew it.”
This past August, the first tomato that ripened on the east end of the row came from a plant that Tyler started from seed in his own kitchen window. It was lopsided and enormous and the color of a fire engine. He carried it across the yard in both hands, as if it were an egg, and set it on my porch rail. I cut it into thick slices with salt and pepper, and we ate it standing up, the two of us, on either side of a very small white gate. It was, I swear to you, the best tomato of my life.